An absorbent article such as a paper diaper is designed to be opened by using a hook-and-loop fastener so that the absorbent article can be attached and detached to and from a human body. The hook-and-loop fastener includes a male member and a female member that are joined to and separated from each other by engagement and disengagement therebetween. The male member is formed to have an engagement face including a group of multiple protrusions (hooks), and the female member is made of a nonwoven fabric or a knitted cloth with which the group of protrusions can engage. Patent Literatures 1 to 3 each disclose a conventional example of the female member in the hook-and-loop fastener.
Patent Literature 1 describes a female member made from an embossed air-through nonwoven fabric whose main fibers are 30 to 100 mm long. The nonwoven fabric is embossed over the full width thereof with a pattern which intersects an MD direction, so that the embossed nonwoven fabric may be stretched out at elongation percentage of 75% or less than that before the emboss process when weighted in a CD direction by 2N/25 mm, and have a thickness of 0.4 mm or more. The fibers constituting the air-through nonwoven fabric form a layer structure in which the fibers are basically two-dimensionally arranged in layers and are fusion-bonded to one another. In other words, the emboss process is performed in a pattern that intersects the MD direction in which a number of fibers are arranged. By the emboss process, the fiber layers are fused and integrated to strengthen the connection between the fibers and to make the fibers less fluffy.
Patent Literature 2 describes a female member formed as follows. Specifically, a spunbonded nonwoven fabric is placed on and integrated with a heat-shrinkable fabric web, and thereafter the fiber web is contracted by thermal processing to form 2 to 40 wrinkles per cm2 in the spunbonded nonwoven fabric, the wrinkles each having a depth of 0.2 mm to 3 mm. In the spunbonded nonwoven fabric, endless fibers two-dimensionally arranged are securely fused by thermal embossing or the like. Accordingly, the spunbonded nonwoven fabric has a characteristic of being unlikely to be fluffy. When the heat-shrinkable fiber web integrated with a lower layer side of the spunbonded nonwoven fabric is thermally contracted, a number of wrinkles are formed in the spunbonded nonwoven fabric, and the wrinkles allow the female member to engage with the male member.
Patent document 3 discloses that loops of a fiber bundle are formed in a heat-nonshrinkable fiber layer in a perforated nonwoven fabric in the following manner. Specifically, the perforated nonwoven fabric is obtained by stacking the heat-nonshrinkable fiber layer on a heat-shrinkable fiber layer, and then by ejecting a high-pressure fluid onto the layered body to interlace the fibers with one another while re-arranging the fibers. Thereafter, the perforated nonwoven fabric is heated to contract the heat shrinkable fiber layer and thereby to form the loops of a fiber bundle in the heat-nonshrinkable fiber layer. With such processes, curled objects projecting in random directions are formed.